Jack Balkin looks at the broader aspects of President Bush’s vetoing of a bill that would have effectively outlawed enhanced interrogation techniques aka torture, while Marty Lederman looks at the issue from both a legal and moral viewpoint..

Hilzoy discusses the forced resignation of an Obama campaign worker who called Hillary Clinton a monster in an unguarded moment, while Henry Farrell muses that it shows just how bad most blogging academics would be at real world politics!

Hilzoy also mounts a persuasive case that Bill Clinton’s claim that Hillary (privately) tried to convince him to intervene in Rwanda to stop the genocide has about as much credibility as his “I did not have sexual relations with that woman Miss Lewinsky” statement. On the same apparent Clinton strategy theme, Slate highlights another instance of Clinton staking credit for something she didn’t do, namely bring peace to Northern Ireland. Even if like me (KP) you find Obama’s rhetoric simultaneously overblown and underwhelming, it’s hard to disagree with this assessment:

Trimble, the leader of the main Protestant political party at the time, says that while he did meet Hillary a few times in Belfast, “there was nothing that she did, apart from accompanying Bill” that he can remember: “Being a cheerleader for something is different from being a major player.”

Jason Soon examines current developments in Malaysian provincial elections through the lens of historic and ongoing tensions between ethnic Malays and Chinese, while Andrew Leigh posts a detailed piece on the Malaysian situation by his political scientist father Michael.

Andrew Bartlett hopes that Rudd’s recent visit is the dawn of a more constructive role for Australia in improving PNG’s prospects. 11. KP: I can’t quite follow how he manages to blame John Howard for these things though. They have more to do with endemic corruption, tribalism and gross ignorance caused by abysmal education standards, none of which are obviously Howard’s fault [↩]

It was Rice who insisted that this militant Islamic group be allowed to participate in the January 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, over strong protests from both Israelis and moderate Palestinians. Rice argued that the Islamic militancy represented by Hamas had to be given a political voice. But when Hamas won and predictably continued to reject Israel’s right to exist, the United States had no coherent follow-up strategy. A new article in Vanity Fair says that Washington secretly egged on the rival Fatah movement to stage a coup in Gaza, but Hamas moved first with a countercoup that expelled Fatah security forces.

Pommygranate also looks at the current escalating (again) violence in the Middle East and what he sees as the usual anti-Israel responses from the UN and EU.

Saint quotes extensively a former chief economist of Venezuela who notes that the myth of Chavez is nothing like the reality, that he does little for the poor. 22. gilmae: Colour me shocked [↩]

The failings of ANU Masters students do not include underconfidece, as Andrew Leigh discovered in a class experiment.

Ultra-leftist Joshua Gans advocates a plastic bag levy on the basis of promising results in communist Ireland. 33. KP: I wonder whether Joshua has read the Productivity Commission’s report on whether attempting to reduce plastic bag use is even a sensible policy objective, which is surely the question you need to answer before examining whether a tax would be effective in achieving it [↩]

Harry Clarke protests that the RBA’s tight monetary stance is short sighted, and will stunt the investment boom. He blames the Government’s labour market policies.

Law

Single sex gyms like Fernwood (“no Toms, no Harrys and definitely no Dicks”) have had no difficulty getting administrative exemptions from anti-discrimination laws in Australia. David Bernstein examines the American experience, which has been rather different.

Sandy Levinson wonders why pundits are obsessing about the more irrational aspects of the Presidential primaries process, but never give a moment’s thought to numerous at least equally arcane and archaic aspects of the US Constitution.

Peter Timmins looks at a rare FOI case where the AAT has actually ruled that the public interest in disclosure of documents outweighs government’s (oops! the public) interest in keeping them secret.

Eugene Volokh looks at the legal ethics position of a lawyer who can only save a person falsely accused and convicted of murder by breaking a client confidence, and at the broader human ethical position as he sees it.

I think people accept and embrace “Burkean gradualism” when they don’t care about the outcome, which often is the same as saying they have incentives or motivations not to care about the outcome — a VP at Exxon can rather readily convince himself that climate change is a matter best left to unconscious mechanisms that, incidentally, won’t have any foreseeable tangible impact before he’s retired and gone fishing.

Will Wilkinson looks at a recent happiness study which seems at least partly to contradict earlier happiness research relied on by neo-socialist Jeremiahs like Clive Hamilton:

[I]t is not true that there is some critical level of GDP per capita above which income has no further effect on life satisfaction. Instead, each doubling of income adds about the same amount to life satisfaction, across poor and rich countries alike.

Alison Croggon reviews Love Story, billed as a whimsical, off-beat romantic comedy, on at the Fairfax Studio of the Victorian Arts Centre. Meanwhile, Chris Boyd also looks at Love Story and disses the new Nick Cave album in an entertaining if disjointed rant.

Sport

Tony T looks at Harbhajan’s Singh’s parting shot after a weird and unpleasant summer of cricket. 44. KP: It’s beginning to seem that the administrators of world cricket have developed the same sort of self-destructive mindset that currently sees world rugby sliding into irrelevance by refusing to embrace rule changes needed to moderate stupefyingly boring 10 man tactics [↩]

Displaying uncharacteristic slackness, Niall Cook has only blogged one of the weekend’s three V8 Supercar races at Sydney’s Eastern Creek. Lift your game son.

The question that women casually shopping for perfume ask more than any other is this: What scent drives men wild? After years of intense research, we know the definitive answer. It is bacon.

Adrian the Cabbie posts a piece about a typical aggressive d***head passenger that reminds me (KP) why I was relieved to give up taxi-driving when I finished my legal qualifications and moved to Darwin. It’s an occupation that has its attractions but they’re massively outweighed by the downside.

Looking at these social networking sites, I don’t see any banality of friendship worth mentioning, just the banality of target marketing and teenage angst. And an ugly, blaring superfluity of banner ads signaling how successful they are.

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About Ken Parish

Ken Parish is a legal academic at Charles Darwin University, with research areas in public law (constitutional and administrative law) and teaching & learning theory and practice. He has been a legal academic for almost 12 years. Before that he ran a legal practice in Darwin for 15 years and was a Member of the NT Legislative Assembly for almost 4 years in he early 1990s.

19 Responses to Missing Link Daily

KP: I can’t see how I’ve said the serious situation in PNG is John Howard’s fault. I’ve had a swipe at Howard for being generally contemptuous and neglectful of the Pacific in general (incl PNG) but I don’t suggest its Howard’s fault things are as bad as they are. Obviously if there’d been more attention of a more considered nature, things might be better in PNG than they are, but even so Australia can only do so much – it will be up to the locals in the end, as it almost always is.

I should make clear, if it isn’t already, that the “ultra left” and “communist” epthets were tongue-in-cheek, or at least so I assume. James Farrell inserted the item and I just added my comment (I have read the whole report too – well, those parts pertaining to plastic bags anyway – and found it persuasive, although I obviously don’t possess the sort of economics and statistical expertise that you do).

BTW The link to the Productivity Commission report in the ABC News report to which I linked in my primary post sidenote is degraded. Anyone wanting to read the PC report can find it here. There are quite a few incidental references to plastic bags in the report, but the main section dealing with them starts at page 201.

I was so disappointed by Saturday’s depth of coverage and pathetic racing, I’m afraid I was otherwise occupied while watching yesterday’s two races. However, I was pleased to see DJR get up, and will be having something to say later today.

Yes it’s an obnoxious and old message that certainly suits defensive MSM interest in denigrating blogging as, as you put it, just meaningless angry noise by wannabe journalists. Nevertheless, I still think the cartoon was quite funny and we should retain the ability to laugh at ourselves. The cartoon certainly does accurately depict the approach of some bloggers (I won’t mention any names), and even for the rest of us I think there’s an element of the psychology of blogging whereby we (1) enjoy the occasional stoush; and (2) might well shout/bark/type into the darkness even if there was no-one reading. Of course, the MSM quite calculatedly creates tabloid stoushes/controversy because they know it sells newspapers/attracts eyeballs, so there’s a certain irony in their portraying bloggers as compulsive angry ranters.

It looks like the cartoon/T-shirt has indeed appropriated the central idea of the earlier New Yorker one. It probably isn’t a breach of copyright because copyright protects the expression of an idea not the idea itself. Moreover, as Gilmae says, the idea is an old and unoriginal one. Is it plagiarism? Possibly, but that’s mostly an academic “crime” and cartoonists aren’t academics. I’m happy to regard it as derivative and an expression of a rather tired joke, but quite funny just the same.

I didn’t say it was plagarism or a breach of copywright. I think the way the NYer one is expressed is alot wittier. I don’t do scatalogical dog t-shirts though, I feel the same way about the Mambo dog trumpet one too. ;-)

I guess the New Yorker one wouldn’t be very visible on a T-shirt. However I agree with, I would never wear it, just as I’ve never worn a Mambo one. I’m more your boring, plain coloured T shirt sort of person.

Joshua, I thought the tongue-in-cheek was obvious, since plastic bags seem to have become a talking point on the libertarian right. Furthermore, in my case I was confident you would be familiar with the PC report.

Infamous art thief and notorious plagiarist, “Sir Roger”, suddenly swept into the gallery, his dark cloak flying, unbuttoned his smoking jacket, firmly stamped his patent leather pumps squarely and apart, took a long suck on his Meerschaum pipe and stroked his evil, handlebar moustache. His black eyes stared low and darkly from beneath his bushy eyebrows at the throng of critics arrayed against him.

‘Tis but a pitcher,” he intoned. “It is what it is, no more. Of course it is derivative. We made no other claim. We are not in a competition for originality – this is not merely the internet. This is blogging. We meant it as a joke – and an offensive one at that – against our self (and any number of trolls), nothing more. Yes, we thought it was amusing, and the picture colourful. We included no requirement that the visitor buy the t-shirt should their eyes, whether accidentally, fall upon the image. But we did think that the more courageously risqué might wish to wear the t-shirt in the privacy of their own home or shopping centre and so we felt duty-bound to make it possible.

And with a grandiose sweep of his cape and a spring in his heel he was gone out the window, out of date, out of favour and out of ideas.